Tuesday, January 18, 2005

Yesterday

We seem to be having less and less knit-content....

I felt quite pleased with our day, in the early evening yesterday. I blocked the ribwarmer, and it looks great. We had a routine hospital appointment at the diabetic clinic for my husband, and he's doing fine. Blood-sugar control good, no problems revealed by the annual eye-test -- blindness being one of the many disagreeable possible side-effects of his condition.

We heard from Mrs Carson, who has secured a plumber for this morning. In the mean time, she has told the girls not to use the bath. They have a shower somewhere else, so they shouldn't suffer too much.

I got some ironing done.

But at nine, I discovered that the newspaper under the Trouble Spot was wet again. I phoned upstairs. Oh, yes, somebody _had_ had a bath, she didn't know she wasn't supposed to.

When Mrs Carson and I were having a similar tussle some years ago about drips into our kitchen, I waited far too long before insisting that she take her kitchen floorboards up and find the trouble. In the mean time, I kept running up and down stairs and questioning the then-tenants about what they had just been doing, every time the drips fell. At one point, I remember saying to our nice lawyer (he's now in jail), "They seem to be sober and responsible young people." And he said, "There's no such thing."

I had a nice note of sympathy from Ann yesterday, about water problems. It's very mysterious stuff. I'm jean@jeanmile.demon.co.uk, if anyone wants to email me. Or send a comment and include your own email address in the body of it. I hate not being able to answer people, which is what happens with comments for some reason.

The Fair Isle jacket is coming along very well. Another picture soon. Mungo in Thessaloniki is delighted with his Koigu jumper.

Our son James is the Beijing correspondent of the Economist magazine. The current issue has a survey of Taiwan by him, actually identified by name. One section of it is about Kinmen Island, which I had never heard of. It is a small island near the mainland, belonging to Taiwan. One of my maxims is that it is impossible to worry retrospectively, but when I read the following paragraph yesterday, I sort of changed my mind:

""The island could be a huge attraction for mainlanders, 1,000 of whom already board boats every day simply to sail close and gawp at one of the giant slogans put up many years ago by Taiwanese troops: 'Unite China with the Three Principles of the People' -- the philosophy espoused by Sun Yat-sen and adopted by the KMT. If they set foot on Kinmen, however, they are in danger from poorly marked minefields, if they stray off the roads, as your correspondent discovered after walking throiugh one by mistake."